City of Richfield, Minnesota
ARB® Mobile™ Helps Drive Up Efficiency
Richfield, Minnesota maintains a small-town atmosphere despite being just ten minutes from downtown Minneapolis. The city of 34,000 has a 122-mile water system with 10,821 services overseen by Acting Utility Superintendent Robert Hintgen.
For more than 23 years, the City of Richfield had read its water meters with personnel walking house to house, using a handheld system with a wire run from the meter to an outside remote. According to Hintgen, not only did nicked and cut wires, sided-over and painted-over remotes cause headaches, but the readers also had to deal with dog bites and being mistaken for trespassers.
Making matters worse, the system was becoming obsolete. The manufacturer would soon not support it or repair its components, resulting in inaccurate reads and an 11 percent rate of Non-Revenue Water (the Metropolitan Council Directive for the area requires ten percent or less).
Hintgen and his team worked together to further evaluate as many products and systems as possible so that they could make a “cut-and-dried decision.” In the process, they discovered new options they couldn’t do without – including leak detection and reverse-flow detection capability – that would greatly assist the utility in recovering Non-Revenue Water.
Narrowing it Down to Neptune
As Hintgen visited different cities to see firsthand the pros and cons of different systems, they kept hearing about utilities’ success with Neptune, and found that “Neptune just played right into the way we wanted to do things and goals we wanted to achieve.”
Robert Hintgen, Acting Utility Superintendent
And though they knew they needed a mobile AMR system, they also wanted the option of incorporating a fixed base system in the future. Hintgen said, “One key point was upgradeability. We didn’t want to back ourselves into a corner like we had with the current system we just replaced. In talking to multiple cities, Neptune was pretty much the only one to support their current system yet keep it upgradeable without having to do a full-fledged meter changeout.”
Since they had kept the city council continually updated, Hintgen had no trouble getting approval for the system. In a meeting with Richfield’s city council and city manager, the utility superintendents set up meters in a conference room to demonstrate the flaws of the current pulser-based system (mismatched readings from the remote and the register, ease of tampering, etc.), and the pros of switching to Neptune’s ARB
® Utility Management Systems
TM
that are based on absolute encoders (the remote reading originates directly from the encoder register).
The utility laid out the business plan to the council members, who understood the value of the investment: the potential for increased revenue from the reduction of Non-Revenue Water and more accurate readings as well as money saved by eliminating the vacant utility position.
On a Roll with ARB® Mobile™
With all on board and a detailed plan in place, Richfield embarked on an 18-month, city-wide meter changeout in August 2007. Neptune Territory Manager Ian Coburn and Northern Water Works Supply Representatives Todd Phillips and Brian Rollins stepped in as partners in the implementation.
Rollins, the head of the installation crew, led a team of “absolute aces,” according to Young. “They had [people] seemingly on standby to handle any problems… and made our lives really easy.”
The team installed nearly 11,000 of Neptune’s E-Coder)R900i
TM
combination absolute encoder/radio frequency transmitters. Initial reads were obtained using handhelds. In July 2008, with the installation work nearing completion, the utility received its MRX920
TM
Mobile Data Collector.
According to Hintgen, before the project, on average it would take two readers between 16 and 20 hours to read one of Richfield’s twelve reading districts – approximately 900 to 1,000 water meters. Now the utility can read the same number in 45 minutes or less. Young added that on a good-weather day, the two walk-by readers could accomplish 60 reads an hour; with ARB Mobile from Neptune, the utility now reads over 125 meters a minute.
With More Reads, the News Gets Out
The city manager was taken on a mobile route and was quite taken with the system. He was so impressed that he arranged to feature it on a local TV program about city projects called “Out and About.” Not to be outdone, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune also covered the story as the utility neared 95 percent completion in August 2008.
To educate the public on the changeout, the City of Richfield aired its own “infomercial” on a local cable TV station. The utility answered questions and then showed residents an example of an entire installation at an employee’s house, step by step.
As the installations progressed, the utility created a leak detection letter based on the leak alert data from the E-Coder® that it sent to residents, alerting them to any potential leak and offering help in locating the source. After 750 notices, half called for assistance, with not one negative comment. Instead, customers have been particularly appreciative, thanking the utility for “such a great tool”.
Accounting for Success
As of August 2008, Richfield had just begun its changeout of the 400 commercial and industrial meters in the project. Before the program, the city used turbine meters exclusively for its C&I applications instead of compound meters. After just a week or two into the replacement, Hintgen’s findings “guarantee[d] our unaccounted-for water percentage is going to go down”.
According to Hintgen, the project has avoided any major obstacles, whether physical barriers or red tape. He credits planning. “If you do the homework prior to [the installation], it works out really well.” That meant pre-installation site visits and having all the necessary tools to get the job done — including Neptune’s ARB Mobile.
With anticipated completion in February 2009, the ARB Utility Management System is already paying for itself according to Hintgen. “The amount of staff time we’ve recouped because we can read the city in four hours instead of 195 hours, the unaccounted-for water that we can start billing for and collecting fees on, and the vacant position that never had to be filled are already saving us money.”
Hintgen added that with Neptune, they realized success on many fronts, “unaccounted-for water, leak detection, and safety of the [meter reader]… you’re in a vehicle and you’re safe. No more dog bites, no more ‘trespasser’ calls, and no more winter accidents. We had a guy who slipped on ice while reading meters and was out for three weeks with a hurt back; we don’t have to deal with that any more.”
“There are so many benefits and they’re all important – we try to take advantage of every one of them.”
